No Church in the Wild
by CallHerVictor
Summary: Written for Gilly, whose prompt was this: "They fall in love with Captain Janeway, they wake up next to me." Dark-ish with a J/C twist for lemony goodness.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: This is not your typical Janeway. This is dark, bitter chocolate Season Five Janeway more suited to a Showtime special or something... and the t****itle is credited to JayZ and Kayne's "No Church in the Wild". **

**Dedication: Thanks to Gilly for the prompt, which is brilliantly pulled off a line from "Notting Hill" and adapted to fit our lovely captain. For you, darkly, darling Gilly.**

* * *

The nearly silent hush of breath rises and falls his chest: bare, golden skin blended down by the light of two sinking suns over Thalithania. Even its name is beautiful, like something mystical and legendary, wrought in ethereal mist. Briny air works its way over my heat-soaked skin. Standing, stretching, and sighing, body still burning but pleasantly full, though not as sated as it could potentially be.

A purple night closes in over our seaside bungalow. It's less than a room: a bed, a chair, a patio overlooking the horizon. No imagination needed to determine what this place is arranged to provide - _did_ provide - comfortable space that can accommodate no more than two bodies.

I reassemble my uniform but don't bother with the jacket. The night air is still sticky with the day's dying heat and the walk back to the transport sight is well over a kilometer.

From the bed, he catches my wrist with warm but firm pressure. "You would leave me without farewell."

It's a statement tossed out as a question, but also a proposition. With a knee sunk down beside him, I push back the fine hair falling over his eyes, the same color as a blistering Indiana-winter. _White_.

"What would you have me say?"

Wet, coaxing lips are rested against the pulse point of my wrist, and the answer is _nothing_. What design he has on our goodbye needs no words, but will add an epilogue to the hours of bliss we've already shared.

A hand works up beneath the untucked corner of my shirt, finds purchase on my ribs, and pulls me back down into a tangle of skin. Half-clothed where the half now bears the weight of the four, brass pips on my collar, he stops. Stares. Notices them when he hadn't before. His words are stilted and seemingly misaligned under the translator, but hard to hear for entirely different reasons.

"What meaning have those?"

"I'm the captain."

White-eyes flit from neck to breast then lower, taking stock of what he assumes he's conquered unknowingly, and as if knowing it now, rekindles a previous desire. Beneath the sheet, his body hardens, skin tightening until every long line of muscle is perceptible against the barest touch. So much different than a human male but no less telling. A thumb circles the distinct outline beneath my own shirt and my breath catches around a near gasp.

"Captain," he repeats. "Your ship is as beautiful as you?"

A difficult question to answer but growing exponentially less relevant compared to where his hands are questing now. Long fingers work their way back into the warm, wet heat he's at least fifty percent responsible for. It's taken him no time at all to learn where to go and what to do, so the sensation is quickly overwhelming.

"It's a… fine… ship." Words come out through gritted teeth, less anger and more an attempt at controlling each new bolt of electricity arcing over my skin.

"Captain," he repeats again.

As if it means something to him. Or to me. But it must because my body chooses that moment to lose cohesion as the orgasm takes me from inside out.

I wasn't always this way.

And I wonder if part of me doesn't want to be caught. Exposed. _Reprimanded_. Still comfortable in the knowledge there's no one here to do that. No one to answer to, if answering means explaining what the hell I'm thinking flaunting every regulation on inter-species relations… and what it means to be a Starfleet captain, _now_. Not in the days of James T. Kirk, when fucking was part of first-contact in and of itself.

Every lesson I've been taught about intimacy and propriety and morality flash-burned into non-existence under a few warm kilos of strange, alien tissue. Exotic features no more arresting on their faces as they are on other parts of their body. Physiognomy adapted to genetics then eliminated by them: bone, cartilage, and sinew, a ridge here, a swirl there, in stark opposition to a backdrop of smooth human skin. Eliciting dazzling and delightful sensations depending on _where_ they're placed.

Some take their time, stealing moments already stolen to observe the naked differences between us, remarking briefly on color and consistency, responses to heat and pressure. Those are the ones I truly enjoy. Who mingle hesitant curiosity with certain lust, their touch thoughtful and rhythmic like waves crashing against sea-worn rocks. Possessing clear knowledge they're not the first to strike these shores but hopeful, sometimes certain, theirs will be the greatest impact.

They never are.

Like I expect something as casual as casual sex should be any more complicated than it truly is, more emotional than need be. That's the point after all. A clean break, without pause. No looking back when you're hurtling through space at warp eight. No time to think or reflect on what life could look like, _would_ look like, if you attached yourself to someone or something for longer than it took to refill a cargo hold.

But I'm surprised how easy, how _predictable_, it's all become: The first few seconds of opening hail, a diplomatic dinner, a bustling outpost rife with men in search of the creature comforts their tiny, withered vessels can't provide. Always willing, most discrete. The few who aren't, are quickly indoctrinated into my way of thinking.

They fall in love with Captain Janeway, they wake up next to me.

By chronometer nightfall the ship is quiet, filled with the still rush of the engines holding us in low orbit of the planet. A quick check of the registry shows most the crew have finished their leave, tucked themselves back into quarters, and reported for duty in preparation of our scheduled departure… less than three hours from now.

Tomorrow's going to be a long day.

When the turbolift opens, the prickling sensation that I've been caught rises fresh heat into my cheeks. But it's a fear quickly suffused under the certainty that, as far as internal sensors are concerned, I've been in my quarters since dinner.

"Captain."

"Mister Paris."

Of any of them, he _might_ know. Tom's met enough women in his lifetime, on Earth and in space, to understand the thrill of passing dalliance, the uncomplicated flavor of entanglement as it spans sector to sector. I'm amazed he gave it up at all.

Though, not surprised.

Men have this luxury. This capacity to uncoil themselves against another person as freely and wantonly as they'd like only to later settle into something deep and meaningful without remorse. It's an idiosyncrasy that has pervaded throughout the galaxy. No race striving for survival sends their child-bearing gender to the front lines. Men have always ventured out first, tamping down the path for the softer sex to follow. Even as enlightened and forward thinking as humanity has become to previous incarnations of this particular behavior, I'm not ignorant to the sensibility of it.

Even I can't stop myself from considering it. Every time I assign an away team hosting B'Elanna, or Samantha, or even Seven, it gives me pause. The ratio of men to women on our ship is not uneven, nor is the deck stacked with any sure combination of pairs. But the probability that our journey, even shortened, might require more hands on deck has always been high. And Chakotay hadn't hesitated to point it out so many years ago. Children would _have _to happen in time. Protecting the women, now, only seems… logical.

"Ma'am?"

_Shit_. Any one word he's said in the last few minutes has gone unheard and equally unrecorded.

"I'm sorry, Tom." The lines wipe away from my forehead but I catch the faint scent of a stranger on my skin. I drop my wrist against my hip. "I'm a little distracted."

"Exhausted, looks like."

A few years ago is might have sounded haughty or worse, _suggestive_. But now, he only considers me with the clinical eye of a medic. When he draws my arm away from its hiding spot, all my focus goes into not snapping it back for the duration it takes him to measure my pulse.

"You didn't eat the local meat, did you? The Doc's had a few cases of anaphylaxis in the last few days."

"No. Just tired."

Seeming satisfied, he motions toward the turbolift doors as it stops at my deck. "Try to get a few hours before we shove off, okay? Nurse's orders."

I manage a weak, "Aye, sir," and step off the short distance to my door.

But sleep isn't sleep when it's _sleeping off_…

By mid-afternoon, Thalithania is on long-range sensors. No more than a blip of binary suns and a little color left in Harry's cheeks. And Chakotay's. He makes his way into my ready room around lunch under the guise of a system's report.

"Have you eaten?"

A slow shake of my head is all I offer, more interested in B'Elanna's final projections of the quantum slipstream drive now that she has enough benomite to power the damn thing. It's still stuck in my craw. Months of work, all brought to a screeching halt when we couldn't synthesize the fuel it needed to use it. Which was the reason for stopping at Thalithania in the first place.

I rise to move around my desk, pulled by the scent of whatever dish Chakotay has taken the liberty to replicate then portion. He sits but waits, watches, while I scroll through the PADD.

"B'Elanna's projections are good, but I'd like to see if she can have it up and running by the end of the week. Give her whatever staff she needs to make it happen."

He nods and tosses out the napkin across my lap, waits until my mouth is full to ask. "How was your leave?"

"Fine."

"Tom said you looked a little tired last night. Did you get some sleep?"

_That_ is annoying. To think I've been the topic of conversation between my senior staff at all, aggravating, but still beyond reproach especially where my first officer is concerned.

"A few hours." For anyone else, the silence spanning a few seconds would be enough to warn them away, but Chakotay is content to wait until I look at him again. "I'm _fine_, Commander."

What that really means, I don't have to elaborate. Wouldn't, even though I probably should, if only to hear it spoke aloud. To hear the same kind of finality in the words as I felt them when I read Mark's letter so many months ago. But know, in Chakotay, I will only find debate. He won't understand what a long, hard look at my life has revealed. In the infinite black wisdom of The Void, the pieces fell together. Hard. Fast. Terrifying at first. But comforting now, in the way that losing particular expectations alleviates dispiriting strain.

I wasn't always this way.

At some point, I wanted to be a wife. More than a lover and a live-in. I wanted the soft, familiar rush of a man's breath on my neck at night, the patient, steady arm wrapped around my chest. I wanted, at some point, to have a child.

Until the stars had winked out, I hadn't given much thought to the promised past against the potential future; hopes that had once been merely stalled by our journey home are now desires spun on divergent vectors. Every personal want suppressed under the caveat… "When we make it home."

I'm not getting any younger, any more tolerant or less archetypical of a leader. Demanding from all of them their best in the face of infinite odds. What husband would stand it? What child could flourish under it? None.

Not even Chakotay, who is sitting, watching, _waiting_ for the explanation he suspects but won't name. Still, he's maintained this hope longer than most would have, probably longer than he _should_. The open-secret he holds in his eyes, the way he bends into my seemingly innocuous contact. A hand here, a finger there. Nothing to suggest or warrant any overture, enough to convey my affection, but more so, my restriction…

Not until we get home.

We move idlely between topics, finishing our lunch that, if we had to admit it, feels a little rehearsed. Still, he leaves me with a fresh cup of coffee in one hand and the sweet ambition that with a little luck by this time next week…

"...we might be having lunch in the Alpha Quadrant."

Then the damn thing breaks. Slams out a few thousand light years and breaks. Albeit with impeccable timing, before we're thrown out of the slipstream and possibly to our deaths. After careful inspection of the transmission she received, Seven concludes there was a lot more at work than a simple set of miscalculated phase corrections.

Ensign Kim to the rescue.

But I can see it tears at him the way time paradoxes always do. If A… then B… but how C…

"Don't even try," I hear myself say.

Or know that trying only works you into believing there was something left behind. That some shadow of your former life exists somewhere in the multi-verse and you can snatch it back, peek inside, and understand better now what you didn't then, if only to say you accomplished _something_.

Don't even try.

Instead, spend the next six months battling a sickening, silent belief that your crew is somehow collectively reliving their adolescents. Watch their petulant behavior turn simple complications into harrowing moral and ethical dilemmas, only regretful in hindsight for not simply following your orders to begin with. Rip them back from the maw of death without an anxiolytic moment between one problem and the next. Sleep _less _than you already do.

Cut the tension with the captain of an Upheridian freighter. Backed up against his desk, his almost reptilian lips coursing across your skin, demanding this must be quick and quiet and removed of regularity during the course of your negotiations.

Tell him: "Yes. Yes. No one on my crew can know either."

Because for every hurried inch we travel, we're risking our rank. Our respect. Our capacity to govern the collective crews beneath us. But beneath each other, we are raw and desperate for the connection. Held hostage by those we seek to protect. Upheridians, as it turns out, suffer the Vulcan perplexity of pre-arranged marriages, but are only allowed to return to their homeworld once in a decade.

"Four more years and I go home to a stranger," he tells me dully, afterwards. "How long for you?"

"Nine, maybe ten times that." Maybe never. In the reflection of the brushed-chrome wall, I smooth my hair back into place. "Anything else we should know about this region of space?"

He stoops to retrieve the computer console from beside his desk where it had landed when… well…

Strange star charts used to scare me. More so, the prospect of not possessing a single, familiar point by which to navigate. Now, they mean possibility, a chance to find something new or alien to carry us the distance we have in less than the time we don't.

"This is where the Imperium begins," he says. "And this is where it ends."

The sectors he indicates are vast. Will take us months to cross, or years to avoid if his tone is any indication as to which he might suggest. "The Imperium?"

"Devore. Go around them if you can."

It seems trite to point out avoidance is not really in my repertoire. After the Borg, the Kazon, the Vidians, the Voth. _Him_. How bad could they actually be?


	2. Chapter 2

The Brenari remind me of Betazoids, the way they hedge every statement with caution, every question with watchful concern. Just so, they make their case. Ask for our help in making their rendezvous only to escape the indiscriminant mass-murder of their people.

Maybe it's my own twisted nature, the hardwired defiance that runs deeper than bone. My father had it. My mother, too. And I grew up watching it played out like some great, Shakespearean drama. A clash of warring houses under one roof. Arguments that frightened my sister to tears, ignited me. Enraged and invoked a righteous need to pick a side. Broken down to its constituent parts, any battle is the same. Someone is right. The other, is wrong. One wins. One loses. The pieces fall where they may.

I need more time to consider what's at stake, but my decision is already made. Had been, the moment those children looked at me. Wondering, questioning. Too young be to so dogged by death, yet still hopeful without reason to be.

I ask for the chance to review it with my senior staff, but it's only Chakotay and Tuvok who hang back after the others are gone.

"Assisting the Brenari would be a direct violation of the Prime Directive."

Tuvok _would_ be the first to point that out, and his argument isn't any less valid against Chakotay's.

"Either way we'll have to cross Devore space with three telepaths of our own." _Including you_, he means of Tuvok.

I scrub the tension from my eyes. "How are B'Elanna and Seven coming with the modifications to the transporters?"

"They'll be ready within the hour."

"Tell them to come up with a way to accommodate twelve more."

Tuvok's responding nod is quick, but he offers Chakotay an arched eyebrow before pivoting toward the door. We hold there for a full measure's rest, letting the doors slide shut, and the retreating air re-stabilize around the room.

"You still manage to surprise me, Kathryn."

"I can't leave them here to be slaughtered."

"I'm not suggesting that you should." He crosses the distance, stops when his knees are just beyond my own, and reaches a wide palm out between us. It's a firm, warm, familiar gesture. One we've held only a few times but always in the moments one or both of us needed it the most. With a playful tug, he urges me to stand, meet him eyes to… well, chest on him.

"You should have considered a career in the Maquis."

Now _that's_ funny. The best I can muster is a scathing, temporal humor. "Why? So Starfleet could've chased both of us across the Badlands?"

And that, said aloud, is downright hysterical. Full of incredulous assumption that if we hadn't met here, we would have met at all, let alone been together. Still, in a matter of seconds, the scenario plays out, silently, between us. An alternate path that might very well ended in the exact same place we're standing now. Though I could never see myself wearing _that_ much leather.

But Chakotay has always been the more imaginative one. He could probably see me in any combination of ways: removed of sentiment and certain virtue, broken from the sacrosanct methods of my father. As someone who approaches exploration with the same wild abandon he once accused me of suppressing to the point of sheer exhaustion. _Life here is much better than that_. Part of me believes _that_ is who he wants to see more often than what he does.

It's what he's looking for now, as he holds my hand for a second longer, searching my face for hesitation or further ambiguity. All at once, he changes hats, moving back into the role of my first officer and away from the man who _should_ have been my first choice.

"I'll inform the crew."

I have no idea how he does this. It seems… effortless in retrospect, in the moment I need it to be just so. When their warships descend and we drop our shields for the second time and a melodic chorus of strings erupts across ship-wide channels. Chakotay is motionless in my periphery. Stiller yet when a deep, collected voice summons _me_ away from the bridge.

Seated behind my desk, the Inspector offers me a greeting and a smile that suggests he's been slurping cream since our last visit. Then again, there was no way to protect every iota of data he duplicated the last time he was here, poking, prodding. Dissecting my ship. Now it seems his attention has narrowed down to a single point.

_Me_.

"_Gaharay_?"

It means _strangers_.

But what passes between us in those quick, impregnable lines of dialogue is far from strange. Impulsive, maybe. Provocative? Most definitely. Though, on whose part, I'm not sure. But strange it is not. We aren't any more foreign to each other than the uniforms we surround ourselves with – blacks and reds – as natural as our own skin. Maybe more so.

When the Inspector steps into me all I can see without a wider angle is the hard, alien lines of his face, all I can smell is the hot, metallic tang of coffee on his breath. White teeth like polished glass, smiling. Testing. Resisting. _Suggesting_, in no certain terms, the tonality of the next few months.

"Captain. I'm a reasonable man."

_No you're not_.

"And you've been cooperative."

_No. I haven't_.

"Consider this a reminder. You have a long trip through Devore space, and good friends can be an asset."

That depends entirely on how he terms _asset_, and what he's willing to accept in trade.

I'll keep it in mind.

But Chakotay's already working up to debate. Knowing in the way only he could, what time and experience and a darker, deeper nature has afforded him. Men like Kashyk only have infinitive interests in women like me. To claim. To tame. To break.

If he thinks to mention it aloud, he waits too long. Before we know it, Kashyk returns, dressed down to civilian clothes, trying to look no more threatening than a common house cat. My perceptions ignite like the back end of an overworked manifold, coloring every sound wave of every syllable of every word he speaks. Golds and whites and greens and blues… Lies hued in subtle, shifting patterns.

"I'm defecting," is the same December shade of Midwestern dawn.

No one else calls it a mistake, except Seven. Even if they believe it, they wouldn't express it, expect Seven. Then again, with her I am almost always guaranteed debate. Desired or not. It's the price I pay for the reclamation of her individuality, a sure test of my patience.

Golden hair haloed by the overheads of my ready room, the face she makes is less than angelic. Accusatory. Derisive. "He cannot be trusted."

"I'm aware of that."

_Painfully aware_.

"And yet you persist in allowing him to remain on board. _Why?_"

The challenge therein cuts a clear line across the room, one I should know better than to bait, especially in her. But I'm curious. What is it about Kashyk that sets her teeth on edge? Accounting for her inexperience with men and general lack of emotion, what is it about him that would bring her this close to insubordination? No. Not that. This close to _disgust_?

"Did you have a different suggestion?"

She does and wastes no time laying it down. "We should confine him to the brig and continue to the wormhole without his aid."

"That might work." I wet my lips over the rim of my coffee, hold her crystal blue eyes for a long, interminable moment. "Then again, it might also be all the reason he needs to signal his warships to attack us. As long as he's here, it's critical that he believes _we_ believe in him. Who knows, he might _actually_ be defecting."

"You place this ship at risk because of your desire to shape others with your own moral construct."

It earns her a soft warning. "Glass houses, Seven."

Moving around the desk, I linger in her periphery for a fraction of a second longer than is comfortable, knowing it will disengage her, at least temporarily, from her mounting anger. Her time in the collective has made her susceptible to few things so keenly as body position, physical proximity. Even now, she's having a hard time not moving away.

Once moved to the upper level of the ready room, I turn to face her again. "In the collective, you were part of the systematic restructure of thousands of cultures. Was that so different? Is what the Borg does so far removed from the choice I'm giving Kashyk, or the one I gave Chakotay and B'Elanna and the others?"

"That choice did not come at the cost of their individuality."

My arms hold wide to the room, to the ship. But, more so, the uncharted universe. "There's no church in the wild."

More plainly put: "We could spend the next several lifetimes attempting to educate and enlighten the Devore or any number of species and barely scratch the surface of the Delta Quadrant. But I won't throw away the chance that he's telling the truth. If we turn him away now, we lose any hope."

"His hope or _yours_?" Seven doesn't offer a chance at rebuttal and moves in for the kill. "You're allowing him to maintain this deception because you're _attracted_ to him."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Would you like me to elaborate or was my meaning unclear?"

"Neither." With my back to her, the anger is manageable. The revolting truth of it isn't. "You're dismissed."

The swift _schwick_ of the door is all I note of her retreat, the flush of heat in my face a counterpoint to her more salient argument. The one she probably didn't even know she was making.

I wasn't always this way.

I never thought I would be again.

It takes a full minute to pull up, straighten my shoulders and square my stance, turn attention back into the rote of mission preparation. But Seven's words stay with me. She's right. I want him to stay for all the reasons I've forgone to this moment.

My first rationalization is: it's a mistake. A side effect. The unfortunate reality that I'm a starship captain, not an actress; blending the two as seamlessly as was needed would have been impossible if it meant cultivating an altogether new personality. So I used what I had, what I once wanted before wanting was too big of a risk. Safety. Security. _Love_.

A burning weight seats itself inside my chest, followed immediately with the desire to fill my lungs. To breathe past the unrelenting sob working its way up my throat. It lurches free from my mouth. My hand catches the one that follows before I collapse to the couch, trying to draw a deep steadying breath, discovering I'm no longer able.

I _cannot_ love him.

Blood thunders a muted _whur-whur-whur_ loud enough to dampen the sound of my ship, even the sound of my own breath. On my knees now, clutching one hand to my chest, the other to the table.

_Breathe, Kathryn. Breathe_.

But the air won't come. Only the tightness and the feel of a world turned on its head. Light takes on new shape, splitting my vision with painful, white bursts that send my stomach through the floor and back up again. Blind and deaf, I launch myself toward the lavatory, slapping the panel, and making it to the drain just in time to watch the last remnants of breakfast disappear.

I'm certain he tastes it when he kisses me later that day, smells the acrid burn of the nausea that has plagued me most of the afternoon. It occurs to me, as split second before it happens, Devore don't kiss. It's only something he's recently reviewed in our database, and launches into with only a vague idea of practice.

His mouth is hard and unmoving against mine and it all ends too abruptly. He's waiting for my face to indicate…something… when I dive back into his mouth.

It's the only thing that will go in my logs, both professional and private. The intensity shored up for propriety's sake, the duration cut by half. And what follows omitted entirely.

My back lands hard against the nearest wall and I feel myself climbing into him, a heel dug into the solid muscle of his thigh, lifting me up and bringing him into a position of steady control. The flat, cool pads of his finger snake into the gap of my uniform, jerk down and out, taking any fabric it can along for the ride.

White teeth sink into my throat, my shoulder, before traveling the newly exposed skin of my upper body and latching down on more responsive flesh. I hear my own cries echoed out and back inside the shuttle bay. Hear them again when Kashyk swings me away from the wall, drags me down to the floor, and jerks my pants down past my hips.

I'm vaguely aware he's loosened the front of his outfit, pulled himself free of the confines of fabric. Sure of it when he slams into me, punctuating the motion with a deep-throated growl. If my response is anything, it's primordial instinct. Reactionary to the pain and pleasure tangled up in each movement that follows.

There's no rhythm to it. No pace. Just a contact that urges ever-closer to one, concussive end.

Foreknowledge of my species doesn't stop him from utilizing every ounce of strength he has, and I'm convinced he's trying to friction away the skin of my back, grinding me down against the unforgiving floor.

I. Don't. Care.

In fact, I welcome it. If anything to chase away the warm sense that our games were anything but… Bled out, literally, on the shuttle bay floor. Hammered into oblivion so that the next time I see him, I _see_ him, for what he is… not what he could be. Hear the malevolent curl in his lip at the bottom of act two when his reveal is made.

"Congratulations, Captain. For a while I didn't think even you could find it."

The steps are easy after that. The hesitation in my body when he guns me out to the bridge again, faking every tense strand of muscle as I sit beside him, still feeling Chakotay's body heat leeching out of the seat.

Against my thighs. My neck. My back…

The latent scent of him in the fabric, like some forgotten spice inside an overstuffed divan, just strong enough to notice, but soft enough to forget.

"You created false readings."

But I'm so _good_ at it.

"I never lied to you. My offer to take you with us was genuine…"

Where genuine means misguided, impulsive. Self-serving.

He calls it generous.


	3. Chapter 3

"I'll bring the croutons."

My body hurts, my voice echoes the sensation. As lighthearted as it's meant, it hurts to say.

We meet again down deck, a few meters from the place where we were first introduced, now ghosts of our former selves. The Chakotay of that era was intense, quick to anger, but splitting hairs where that anger was aimed. Tuvok he could forgive. Paris he could not. Me? He had no idea what to do with me.

Who _she_ was, I can barely remember. She died at some point, out here. In all this. Ransom, his crew. These aliens.

So, I'll bring the croutons.

Because they're all I have left.

It's a harrowing thought that were only five years in and all I can offer him is some replicated side-item for a morality banquet we wouldn't even be having if I'd listened to him in the first place. But these kinds of apologies won't cut it.

Who knew crusted, day-old squares of bread could be so prophetic.

When dinner ends, the healing begins. I watch them break off into small groups, comforting each other in ways that haven't been necessary since our first year here. B'Elanna is particularly solemn, barely even biting back at Neelix's impassioned attempts to rouse her to… something. _Anything_. Just as long as that look will disappear from her face.

Ransom's first officer, Max. He meant something to her. Not as much as Tom means now, but something at some point, and that nostalgia deserves respect despite all that he'd done. All that he condemned her to when he swiped our shield generator and left us to die.

Chakotay stays close to a small faction of former Maquis, checking my face ever so often through the crowd. I offer him a dim smile, eventually take my shame and my disgust back to my quarters for review.

The night is quiet and cold. Music doesn't even sound right. Off-key, off-pitch. Has, since the moment we left Devore space. So, my quarters are silent, allowing all sounds to perforate the seals between doors. Footfalls and a quiet conversation. The hiss-latch of adjoining rooms opened and closed.

Around eleven, I hear the tell-tale signs of Chakotay shedding his uniform for bed. The hollow slap of boots tossed against the interior wall. The tinkle of water run in the sink basin. A murmured set of words, his way of making audible something he'll want to recall later.

But instead of the eventual fade back to silence, I hear his door open and close again. I sit up. Wait. Punch a few commands into the internal sensors.

Holodeck one.

It's a short ride between decks, down corridors, and into his boxing simulation. I have no idea what I'm doing here until I see him. Centered in the ring, he sends out a few quick jabs at his opponent, which, for the moment, is just the tanned heavy bag.

Then I know exactly what I want.

With his back to me, he wipes the sweat from his face and adjusts his gloves.

Whatever possesses me to don the extra pair on the bench, I can't guess. I have no real desire to be struck, in the face or otherwise. But I do. They feel too big, greasy on the inside, but I flex them to fit and step up, under the rope, and into the ring.

It's my first stuttered punch that whips his attention back around. The next six that follow that brings him in close enough to smell the sweat.

"You're not bad." My elbow is lifted, just a nudge higher than is comfortable. "Keep your arm up."

The next couple punches are solid, hard, but also painful. My fists feel miserably small and ineffective. I stagger back, panting, bent over at the waist.

"Feel better?"

"Not really."

I right myself, square my stance, and center on him.

His reaction is to chuckle, bowing his head the way he does when he's truly amused. "I'm not going to fight you, Kathryn."

A solid jab is easily avoided by knocking my arm through the swing. "And why not?"

"Because I have forty-five kilos on you." He moves back from my next swing. "This is not even close to a fair fight."

"When has it ever been between us?"

A rueful shake of his head. It's all I can provoke him to anymore. He strips off his gloves and begins to unwind the tape. The next swing he's more prepared for, less yielding, and it earns me having an arm pull up behind my back.

This time, he shakes me hard enough to rattle the teeth in my head. "_Enough_."

It's never enough. And turned against him, it affords me the opportunity to rub a hip against his sweat-slicked shorts. He releases me then, tossed out and away from him as he puts a full meter of space between us.

I'm smiling when I say, "You can't tell me you haven't wanted to take a shot at me in the last few days."

Any more than I can tell him I wasn't hoping he would.

"You don't honestly believe I'd strike you." Boldly, he closes the distance again. Close enough to taste. "What do you want?"

"_You_."

He holds my gaze as it travels the full length of him, head to toe and back again, stopping briefly on the dark shadow of hair below his belly button. Just enough that there is no question to what I'm asking for.

"Why now?"

And not four years ago when our bodies were younger. Or three, when I was still comfortable taking his arm in public. Two, after my fiancé had forgotten me. It's not a logical, structured desire. It's the opposite. A crushing, demonic frenzy wrought out by the coldest touch.

The words come out faster than I can reason not to say them. "I want you all the time. But I suppose it seems like a stereotype."

He nods, knowingly, disgusted as he is enthralled by it. "Proper Starfleet Captain and her bad boy."

"I've never thought of you as a _boy_."

Sometimes I break. Sometime he does. But when we both do, there is no church in the wild.

He mutters something to the computer, and if it was unclear in the seconds before, it crystallizes around the metallic thud of the privacy lock engaging.

"So, tell me." He's still stripping off the long, reels of tape, flexing his knuckles into fists. First the left, then the right. "Do you think it's going to get easier after this?"

"I don't care."

A long, hissing breath is sucked between his teeth while his eyes ride me boot to nose and back again.

"You do," he says. "You always care about them. Every time we leave a planet, a space station… you look back. Just to make sure." He bows ever closer, pulling in deep, gulping breathes, surveying the surprise my face must show. "You didn't actually think you left this ship and I didn't know exactly where you were…" Then smiles. "_Did you_?"

"I-I…"

"_Kashyk_ got your tongue?"

Which means his reach doesn't just extend beyond the ship, but inside it as well. A shudder passes, unbidden, across my chest.

"The difference here is –" He jerks me forward, fingers clamped down on my upper arms, my hands useless to stop him inside the bulky gloves. "I'm not going anywhere afterwards. So, we're going to have to negotiate terms."

I should end this now, but I can't bring myself to heel anymore than he thinks he can.

"What kind of terms?"

"This behavior ends. Whatever… _this_ is. You make an honest attempt to come back from it, and stop carving out parts of yourself just because it's easier than confronting them."

If I nod, I don't feel it. Can't perceive it over the hammering inside my chest. Whatever I do, he reads it as agreement, drops his hands from the crushing grip on my shoulders, and relaxes his body against mine.

He kisses me. Gentle, kneading, but quickly moving deeper. If my breath was uneven before, it's useless now. He closes around me, hands moving through the hair at the base of my skull, working out knots I didn't even know where there, releasing pleasant tingles down my spine and into knees that will no longer hold me.

No matter. Chakotay does most of the work, supporting me as effortlessly as he ever has. Just in the moment that I need it as his mouth melts through the deeper cold.

The longer he kisses me, the softer it becomes, almost to the point of complete withdraw before he pressed in hard, firmer again. Still, the smile on his lips never wavers. The moment carries on, infinite in sensation and the pleasure it promises yet to hold. But also devoid the overtly hard clash I'd sought moments before. Suddenly, every brush of his tongue, each patient, skimming touch of his finger begins to unravel me from the inside out.

I taste salt on the edge of the place our mouths meet. Gasp, only to have it swallowed into his lungs as he continues his slow exploration of my mouth.

When it ends, my eyes snap open, confused then curious as to why. Doesn't matter. I start for him again, but he stops me easily.

"That's it."

Rejection bleeds to fury bleeds back to rejection.

_He's not_ serious.

A slow nod says he is. "Until we get home. That's all I'm offering."

I can't take it anymore, have to hear it out loud. "You _cannot_ be serious?"

"You still want me?"

I think it goes without conformation but… "_Yes_."

Chakotay leans his voice into my ear, and the smile is heard there. "Then I _suggest_ you get us home."


End file.
